Clearance Tag Decoder: How to Tell If the Price Will Drop Again

You're standing in front of a clearance endcap holding something you half want. The question is never "is this cheap." It's the harder one: will this be cheaper in a week, or will it be gone?

The tag in your hand actually answers that — partly. Retailers encode markdown stage into their price tags, and a decent chunk of the internet's "secret price code" lore is real. But another chunk is folklore that survives because it's fun to repeat. Knowing which is which is the difference between a system and a superstition.

First, the distinction that saves the most money

Before any cents-ending trivia, get this one right: a clearance tag and a sale tag are completely different animals.

• Clearance is permanent. The retailer has decided to stop carrying the item at this store. The price only goes down from here, on a schedule, until it sells or gets pulled. Nothing is coming back to restock it.
• A temporary promotion — Walmart's red "Rollback", a weekly ad price, a seasonal event — expires and the price goes back up. There is no markdown ladder underneath it.

This single distinction decides your strategy. On a promotion, waiting is pure downside: the price rises again. On clearance, waiting is a genuine trade — a lower price against the risk it's gone. Walmart makes it easiest by colour-coding it: yellow means clearance, red means rollback.

What each retailer's tag tells you

Store	The reliable signal	The cents-ending lore	Worth trusting?
Costco	An asterisk in the top-right corner: this item is not being reordered	.97 = marked down; .00 or .88 = a store-level markdown, often a return, display unit, or damaged box	Asterisk: yes — it's the most dependable mark in any US store. Endings: usually right, but inspect .00/.88 items closely
Target	The percentage printed in the tag's corner — 30, 50 or 70	.04 = final markdown, .08 = more cuts coming	Percentage: yes. Endings: mostly just the arithmetic of the discount, not a deliberate code
Walmart	Yellow tag = clearance (permanent), red Rollback = temporary	prices ending in 0 or 1 = late stage	Colour: yes, and it's the single most useful signal in the building. Endings: loose and vary by store
Home Depot / Lowe's	Yellow clearance tag (vs. orange promotional signage)	.06 = marked down once, .03 = deep or final, .01 = pull it from the floor	Widely observed by employees and shoppers, not published policy. Treat as a hint, not a guarantee
Best Buy and most others	The words on the tag — "clearance", "open-box", the condition grade	—	No meaningful cents code. Read the label

Two footnotes worth knowing. Costco's asterisk also appears on seasonal items and things that are temporarily out of stock, so it means "don't count on it being here next time" rather than strictly "discontinued forever." And Costco's .00/.88 prices are manager markdowns that often exist because something is wrong with the item — a return, a missing part, a beaten-up box. Open it before you buy.

How much of the "secret code" is actually real

Here's the honest hierarchy, because a lot of what circulates online is a decade-old employee tip that's been photocopied into oblivion:

The reason the middle tier keeps slipping is mundane: most cents endings are just the arithmetic. Take 70% off $44.99 and you land on $13.49 — round it into the clearance system and you get an ending nobody chose on purpose. Target's famous "4 and 8" endings come out of exactly that. They correlate with deep markdowns because deep markdowns produce them, not because someone assigned them a meaning.

So use the endings as a tiebreaker, never as the basis of a decision.

The actual decision: wait, or take it now

Every clearance item is a race between two lines. One is how deep the discount goes — that only improves with time. The other is the odds it's still on the shelf when you come back — that only gets worse. You want to buy where they cross.

In practice that resolves into three rules:

• Deep discount, thin stock → buy it now. At 70% off with three left on the shelf, there is no fourth markdown to wait for. This is the situation the whole system exists to reward.
• Shallow discount, deep stock → wait. Just entered clearance at 30% with a full row of them? Retailers review clearance roughly every one to two weeks. Come back.
• Unique sizes, colours and models are the exception. For a common item you're racing the calendar. For the one pair in your size, you're racing every other shopper — and you'll lose. Buy it.

Seasonal goods behave differently again: end-of-season stock will absolutely march all the way down, but the good sizes and popular colours evaporate at the first markdown. If you're buying patio furniture in September for next summer, the deepest price and the empty pallet arrive at nearly the same moment. Our best-time-to-buy calendar has the year-round version of this.

The one move that beats reading tags

Here's the thing no cents-ending will ever tell you: the paper tag is frequently out of date.

Markdowns land in the store's system first and get printed onto shelf tags later — commonly a day or two later, sometimes longer at a busy store. In that gap, the shelf says $24.99 and the register says $12.49. Deal hunters call it "hidden clearance," and it isn't a trick, just a lag.

So scan it. Both the Walmart and Home Depot apps have a barcode scanner built in, as do most major retail apps:

• Scan the barcode on the shelf label, not the one on the box — the shelf label is tied to the store's live price for that location.
• If the app comes back lower than the printed tag, that's the price you'll pay. Take it to the register.
• The same scan settles the other question for free: it confirms whether the tag you're looking at is current at all.

Thirty seconds per item, no folklore required. It also travels — the app price is store-specific, so a scan tells you about this location rather than what a stranger found in another state.

Penny items: the myth worth retiring

You'll run into the legend of the $0.01 item, mostly at Home Depot. It's real, and it's badly misunderstood.

$0.01 is not a discount. It's a delete command. When a retailer decides an item is done, the system prices it at a penny to flag employees to pull it off the floor and dispose of it. It was never offered to you for sale. Stores can and do refuse to sell them, and a cashier stopping you isn't being difficult — they're following policy.

Treat penny finds as a lottery ticket you got for free while you were already in the store. Never as a reason to make the trip.

Two things to check before the tag convinces you

• A big percentage off is not the same as a good price. Clearance percentages are struck off the original list price, which for seasonal or house-brand goods may never have been a real market price. Check the price history before you're impressed by a number — the tools are in our Amazon money-saving features guide.
• Clearance often comes with a worse return policy. Deeply reduced items are frequently final sale, or carry a shorter return window than the store's standard. Ask before you buy anything you might bring back, and know what your options are if it goes wrong. Clearance items are also usually excluded from price adjustments.

The short version: colour tells you whether the price will ever go back up, the corner markings tell you how far down the ladder you are, the cents endings are a hint you should never lean on, and the app scanner beats all of it. Deep discount plus thin stock means buy; shallow discount plus a full shelf means come back next week. More of today's deals are below.